PARK AND CEMETERY. 
NOTES, CHIEFLY HISTORICAL, ON LONDON BURIAL 
PLACES, III. 
At the opening of the nineteenth century there 
existed in the numerous burial places of London a 
state of affairs that was revolting in the extreme. 
The “City of London” was at that time much 
smaller in area than at present, its area having 
since been extended by the “Metropolitan Local 
Management Act’’ of 1849. The increase in its 
population has likewise been enormous during the 
latter half of the nineteenth century. The “city” 
in the earlier years comprised an irregular area of 
about a mile and a half length from east to west, 
and three-quarters of a mile north and south upon 
the bank of the Thames. The term “city” is still 
applied to that portion of the present area in con- 
tradistinction to other portions. In the expansion 
subsequent to the middle of the century the city took 
in suburban towns, each supplied with its burial 
place or places, all of them in practically the same 
condition as those already within the city; that is, 
crowded to overflowing. The records showed that 
more than two millions of burials had taken place 
within the “city” during the century ending in 
1837, and it was asserted that the unrecorded 
burials surreptitiously made in violation of law 
during that time were very numerous. In the ex- 
pansion of the city various pest fields and plague 
pits were brought within the bounds of the metro- 
polis of the Anglo-Saxon world. In one of these 
50,000 bodies were buried in the fourteenth cen- 
tury. In the plague of 1665 one hundred thousand 
persons are estimated to have died and found 
burial in the neighborhood of their homes. More 
thin eleven hundred bodies were thrown into a 
plague pit in Aldgate churchyard; and there are 
other indications of the solid foundation for the 
assertion heretofore made in these papers that 
London was and is one large burial place. 
* * «- 
The subject of burial in cities had long since 
occupied the attention of political and social 
economists and law makers elsewhere. Paris had, 
as early as 1765, closed all the graveyards within 
her borders and established cemeteries beyond the 
suburbs. In 1776 the benefits which Paris had 
derived from this action were so far recognized that 
a government decree was made by which grave- 
yards were prohibited in all the cities and towns of 
France and interments in churches and chapels were 
declared illegal. In 1782-3, in order to check a 
pestilence then raging, more than six million bodies 
were removed from urban churchyards in France to 
places remote from human habitations. In 1790 
the law closing old burial grounds in the cities was 
extended in its operations to the French villages. 
II7 
Other European countries took similar action, and 
legislation upon the subject in the interests of 
public health was not wanting on this side of the 
water. 
* * # 
But London was “conservative” and slow. In 
1842 evidence was adduced which “exhibited the 
singular instance of the most wealthy, moral and 
civilized community in the world, tolerating a 
practice and an abuse which had been corrected for 
years by nearly all other civilized nations in eveiy 
part of the globe.” These words, used in a leport 
of a royal commission upon the question of the 
health of towns and the sanitary condition of the 
laboring classes, originated in a select committee 
charged with the task of formulating “some legis- 
lative enactments to remedy the evils arising from 
the interment of bodies within the precincts of 
large towns or of places densely populated. The 
“tolerated practice” to which they referred was 
intra-mural burial. The “abuse” they mentioned 
was the almost inconceivable state of affairs that 
had been revealed in the course of the commission’s 
investigations. 
* * * 
The apparent apathy of the Anglo-Saxon metro- 
polis upon a subject of such vital importance was 
in the face of many warnings. Bishop Latimer, 
in a sermon preached in 1552, showed himself in 
advance of the early part of the nineteenth century 
when he said: “The citizens of Nain had their 
burying places without the city, which, no doubt, 
is a laudable thing; and I do marvel that London, 
being so great a city, hath not a burial place with- 
out; for, no doubt, it is an unwholesome thing to 
bury within the city, especially at such a time 
when there be great sicknesses and many die to- 
gether. I think verily that many a man taketh his 
death in St. Paul’s churchyard, and this I speak of 
experience; for I myself, when I have been there 
on some mornings to hear the sermons, have felt 
an ill-savoured, unwholesome savour, that I was 
the worse for a great while after; and I think no 
less — but it is the occasion of great sickness and 
disease.’’ After the great fire. Sir Christopher 
■Wren wished to see suburban cemeteries estab- 
lished and burials in churches and churchyards dis- 
continued, partly because he considered the con- 
stant raising of the level of a churchyard rendered 
the church damp and more liable to premature 
decay. But Wren’s plans for rebuilding the city 
were set aside, and the voice of warning from the 
clergy and physicians throughout the centuries was 
unheeded and the practice of intra urban burial 
not only continued but increased as the years 
went on. L, Viajero. 
